What might make mouse cursor freeze while browsing?

Factual Questions
1

Running IE 5.00 on a Win98 machine. 450 Mhz processor, 128 M of RAM.

OFten, when I click on a link, the mouse cursor freezes on screen for 5-30 seconds. No Web page upload during this freeze – the computer just seems to stand still. This has just begun to happen over the past three days, and I can point to no particular event (no software installs, patch installs, or blue-screen crashes) that coincides with the first time this freezing cropped up.

Possibly related sympton – sometimes upon Shut Down, the computer freezes on the "Windows is shutting down ". It will stay like that all night (or longer), and the machine has to be Reset to get cranking again. Even hitting the power button cannot dislodge a frozen Shutdown – the machine just stays on! But these shutdown abnormalities have been going on for months, much longer than the mouse cursor freezes.

I know that there are probably a million reasons this could happen. What are among the common culprits? I have already gone into MSCONFIG and pruned a lot of unnecessary startup processes, just so the computer wasn’t doing so much all the time.

Also, would getting and running some of Norton Tools help out in this case? I run AdAware religiously as it is, so I’m not worried about a glut of tracking cookies.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

2

See, just now – when i hit Submit, the mouse cursor and the computer froze. I could see the arrow cursor still on the Submit button, but nothing happened for a good 20 seconds or so.

3

Yet again – this time, a 3-4 second delay.

Very weird.

4
  1. Defective Mouse–try another mouse
  2. Corrupt Driver–Go to device manager in control panel and remove the mouse (you will then have to use the keyboard then) shut down the computer, restart, Windows will re-install the driver.
  3. IRQ conflict with something else, is it a serial mouse?
5

Or you can use this as an excuse for a new computer.